


Fourteen Deaths in Corinth

by sparklight



Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore
Genre: Angst and Tragedy, Child Death, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-05
Updated: 2021-02-05
Packaged: 2021-03-17 05:01:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29219904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparklight/pseuds/sparklight
Summary: Medea is still waiting for her reward for killing Pelias at Hera's behest, but she is still certain it will come for all that many years have passed. She left her children in Hera's sanctuary last night, and she and Jason will go fetch them later that day.Except, that is not at all what happens, and years of happiness are shattered to pieces.
Relationships: Jason/Medea (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	Fourteen Deaths in Corinth

"Medea, what have you _done_?"

Medea looks up from Medeios' greedily sucking little face as he tries to empty her out to still his hunger, and though she'd been worried from Jason's tone alone, the expression on his face leaves her breathless. The dark gazes of two of the most hostile and contrary elders that are supposed to be their ever-ready and ever-helpful advisers and instead have been like snakes in the grass since she and Jason arrived silences her for yet another beat or two. A shiver, chill like the grimmest wind blown in from the mountains, steal down her spine. Clutching her youngest child closer to her breast - which he doesn't mind at all, just yet, Medea straightens up.

"What am I supposed to have done?" she asks, voice light, spine stiff, her hands wishing to curve into claws in answer to those dark, dark gazes of the old men flanking her husband.

"Th--- You, the _children_ , Medea. _How could you_?" Jason is moments from crying, his voice breaking twice and threatening more, and he is utterly unknowing of the sneering little look from one elder, standing behind him as he is. The other has better control, but Medea can see the aborted twitch that reveals the suppressed eyeroll. She can also see what has happened, and Medeios wails a protest as she inadvertently rips him from her breast to pull him close, up against her instead of peacefully laying in her arms, his little hand squeezing her full breast.

The children. The children, all thirteen of them, that she'd left at Hera's sanctuary last night as she'd done for the last several years on this very night every time it came by again, to see if this would be the night Hera would fulfill her promise. The children are dead, she can tell, and those vulture-eyed, dog-mouthed men flanking Jason have killed them. Killed them because they have never been happy with foreigners ruling them, one more foreign than the other, and even less pleased that a woman should be the primary of said rulers.

Or if they didn't do it themselves, they have still had a part in the killing in some way. That makes them just as guilty as she, though the people she has indeed killed were not her own children.

Medea grits her teeth, then opens her mouth, but between that and uttering her next few words in her defence, she can see it doesn't matter what she says. They have poisoned her husband against her, and more than that, they have broken him.

"When I left our children at the sanctuary, they were alive, Jason. What's happened?"

The truth is sludge in her mouth, and they all know she's understood what's happened, but her quick understanding has only damned her further. She can see what little light, mad and needy, that still clung to Jason's brown eyes go out like she'd snuffed a candle with her last words. He's not going to survive this. She could drag him with her and he will still die, for it will take her too long to convince him she isn't at fault. In fact, she might have to fight for her life against him, too, because he'll wish to kill the both of them with whatever last spark of actual agency that might still exist in him.

Oh, Jason.

Too easily downtrodden, always looking for others to lead, so often laid to catastrophising. She'd never minded, not really, for he had other strengths and he has been hers, through all these years. Now his faults have allowed others to get underneath what little protections he's had, from himself, from age, from years with her. The elders, not just those two standing in full view behind Jason have broken him, and they know it. The only reason Medea isn't planning some way to take suitable revenge for both her children and her husband's lives and mind is that she knows death will be coming for them anyway, and for the whole of Corinth. They have killed in Hera's sanctuary, and more than that, they've killed children the goddess have promised a gift to. 

Of course, if the goddess had actually given her gift earlier, they wouldn't be dead now but it's too late, all too late, and Medea's galloping heart and tight grip on her last living child can't quiet or soothe Medeios. He's too close to her, and is picking up on her distress, but she can also not put him down. She won't let this child be killed as well. Medeios, darling boy that he is, will be the only thing she'll have left of this life.

The room rings with his cries, and for now that is the only mourning his other siblings will receive. Jason as well, dead man walking as he is. She just hopes he kills himself in a kind way, but she has a feeling he will wish to punish himself, even when he has done no wrong.

"Medea... You're the one who was last seen with them, and they're dead." Jason closes his eyes, and she can breathe a little more easily for being out under that haunted, dim stare. Jason's eyes used to be so bright, even when he was caught in one of his darker episodes. Her chest hurts. But the reprieve is enough to jog her thoughts into more than a wailing swirl of loss and fury.

_Bright Helios, beloved of Rhodes, grandfather, hear me! I am without recourse, cornered like a lioness with only one cub left, the strong father lying slain before her with his great mane covered in gore. Aid your family if you ever had any love left for your mortal children!_

She can only hope he has heard her and, more to the point, is willing to offer aid that might be when and where she'll need it.

"And it is _me_ you think would kill them? I, who have fed them at my breast, each and every one of them, who have given them to the great Hera Akraia in the hope of immortality for them, as I was promised?"

Jason flinches at her words as if she's punched him, but, compared to what might have been the result years before, now it doesn't urge him to listen to her. Instead he merely hunches, as if his spine has been broken, and he looks at her with wide, begging eyes from under the curls drooping into his gaze and holds his hands out. They're strong, still, but trembling, revealing the sensitivities and weaknesses that were always there. The poison is too deep, and she can feel the smug pleasure of the two elders lurking behind him.

"Please, Medea. Just confess," Jason whispers, his voice raw like the blood surely coating Hera's altar right this moment, for Medea doubts the Corinthians have washed it away yet. No, they needed to have Jason see it, needed him to know it was still there, and it needs to stay there until she's dead, until Jason is dead too. It will only condemn them further.

Oh, she has killed for this man, and he is dear to her, but she cannot kill herself for him as well.

Medea smiles tightly, her ears ringing with Medeios' cries, and stands up. Shifts Medeios to one arm, tipping him to lie against her chest, head cushioned against her shoulder, and at last his cries dwindle into sobbing hiccups, slowly calming just as, and along with Medea's heartbeat. The breeze coming in from the window is warmer than it was minutes ago, and there's a golden tint to the light that wasn't there before.

"I can't confess to a crime I haven't committed, my heart. I might have killed my brother, and I might have killed Pelias, bu---"

"And you killed Kreon," one of the men sneers at her, righteous when there is the blood of thirteen children on his hands. Medea laughs, mockingly. Jason only slumps further, but there's a brief frown she can just barely see, there and then gone. He doesn't believe that, at least, well as he shouldn't when he was right there with her being summoned to Kreon and heard the man himself.

"I was summoned here, and gave Kreon the assistance he wished for, _after_ he'd already proclaimed my birth, as well as that of my husband's, made us worthy to rule this fair city of yours that you have besmirched with innocent blood. I have indeed killed, but not my children."

Jason, her poor, poisoned husband, starts crying. Medea's head and heart both throbs in time with shaking noise, but there's nothing she can do. Not when he draws his sword - and not to turn on the men behind him. The poison they have fed him has eaten its way far too deep into his heart, via his eyes and ears. It's a far more powerful poison than any magical such she could devise. So much for her magic and magical drugs; some things anyone can achieve with the right words and pressure.

She smiles as he makes ready to charge her, but he's slow, so slow she has all the time she needs to draw the fragile little glass bottle from the layered flounces of her skirts, and as she throws it he looks almost grateful for it.

Oh, Jason, no.

She can't kill herself for him, but she can also not kill _him_ , for either of them.

That will be her weakness and another pain to bear into the future, for this is only a distraction, a way for her to escape.

Smoke explodes up as the glass shatters, noxious and dark like the ink of squid, and she is the squid fleeing. Medea whirls around, throwing herself at the window under a chorus of confused, angry yelling, then out of it. She almost falls straight off the chariot as she hits it hard with her shoulder and hip, her weight and speed tipping it sideways. Clutching at the rim with strength only a desperate mother could know, Medea manages to pull herself up, grab the reins and urge the shining drakones to move, all without falling off or losing her baby.

Her baby, who is giggling now, despite the shock of their flight, and Medea looks down with burning eyes and tears spilling down her cheeks to the boy on her arm, chewing at one of the golden rings that binds her tresses. He looks like Jason.

"Don't worry, my eyes," she whispers, leaning down to kiss the top of his soft head, tiny wisps of dark curls caressing her chin and cheeks while tears caress Medeios' skull, "they might have gotten all the others, but they won't get you. Or me."

Exhaling sharply, Medea straightens up, tightens her grip on the reins as she turns the snakes eastwards, and lets the golden wind dry her tears.

**Author's Note:**

> Myth check: This is inspired by, and drawing from, several other sources (Pausanias, Eumelos, scholia on Eumelos) for what happens in Corinth, which I read summaries of in _Early Greek Myth_ by Timothy Gantz. 
> 
> Medea seems most often to have killed her children, either inadvertently, or, as in Euripides, intentionally, but at least one version have other people be the guilty ones; the scholia says it was the Corinthians, angry at having a foreigner ruling them, who did it. Eumelos in his _Korinthiaka_ had Medea (and Jason) summoned to Corinth and given rulership, explicitly on the grace of Medea’s bloodline. The children are killed in the sanctuary of Hera Akraia (by the Corinthians in this version), where Medea has been leaving them in expectation of Hera fulfilling her promise to her that they be made immortal (here, my intention is that Hera’s promise is the reward for Medea’s help to kill Pelias). In the version where the killings happen inadvertently, Jason can’t forgive her and leaves for Iolkos.  
> So what happens as a background to this is Medea, as an agent of Hera, kills Pelias for his insult to her, she and Jason has to leave Iolkos, they are summoned to Corinth and given rulership, Kreon dies (childless, hence why Medea and Jason have been summoned).
> 
> I would honestly not have done this at all but reading all this in _Early Greek Myth_ I was just slapped in the face by inspiration, and as much as I am so damn cranky over so many people crowing about Medea doing nothing wrong (her brother and her children says hello), I am pleased with this.


End file.
